The Birthgrave

“All my life,” I said, “knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.”

“When will they fight?” I asked.

“Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.”

I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.”

Vazkor had picked his creatures well—narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.

I should have felt pity, but I felt only contempt. I knew had it been a girl she would have mourned less, and it angered me.

And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me.

It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance.

I do not know why it distressed me so much to see an animal die when human death did not move me. Perhaps because they were more beautiful, and there is no corruption in them, while in the best of men there can always be found some guilt or wickedness which seems to have earned him death.

Sickness, the serpent, is coming to bite you,

Death, the old dark man, is coming to carry you off,

Rest uneasy, you stinking carrion, on your gold beds.

Anxiety grew, the fear that always comes when an established pattern falters.

White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled.

“What do I care for the god?” the woman suddenly screamed, catching up her dead child. “What god is he that takes away my son and leaves me nothing?”

Strange, that when we feel we understand all things, we understand nothing. Strange, that when we feel we understand nothing, we have begun, at last, to understand.

We are the sum of our achievements, nothing more and nothing less. The mountain road which led us here was built by a dead people none of us would remember otherwise. What we create is the only part of us which can survive, or has the right to. Man is nothing, except to other men.

Now there was that look of waiting, and submission—not the frenzy of the stadium, but the quiet sleep-trance of belief. Something stirred in me at it, as I realized I had them in my palm. I stood very still in my white and black, holding the copper things in my hands, and then I began to walk between them toward the god. And I laughed at the god as I went toward him. You—what are you? And he had no answer for me, for here it was the priest who was the power, not the god, poor empty stone.

True beauty is always oddly surprising.

I would be a drudge now, among the tents, and I would kneel before the warriors, and run from them when they shouted at me. I would be a woman, as women were reckoned in this place, a half-souled, witless animal, created to bear and pleasure men: an afterthought of the god.

I raised my arms as if in prayer and heard the mutter of response behind me. Then I scattered the dried grains, red and brown and black, and studied the patterns they formed on the stone ledge before Sibbos. This is not such a mystic thing. You see what it is sensible to see, or else you interpret what you see so that the meaning comes out as you want it.

“Don’t judge yourself,” he said. “None of us are ever good at it.”

“Now you understand,” Rarm said to me. “It was the last cut against yourself to become convinced of your own hideousness. You held to it and nurtured it, and even identified with the devil goddess of Orash in your determination to be accursed. And it never occurred to you that perhaps you saw a false image under the mountain.”

I cried out. I turned the pages, one after the other, in a frenzy. I could not believe what I saw, would not believe it. For the pages of the book were blank.

Oh, yes, there had been writing, this much I could see, but the inks had faded. Now there were only faint smudges and marks here and there on the yellowness. And I could tell nothing from them…

It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth. For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished.

“Uasti was a good teacher,” he said. “She made you look a little way into yourself, see what you could become.”

I am alone. No one stands beside me. I have no Dark Prince to ride in my chariot, to walk with me, to hold me to him. I have no one. And yet. I myself, at last, I have myself. And to me, at this time, it seems enough. It seems more, much more, than enough.